Part 6 (1/2)

He fell into border disputes with the English, and the result was one of the fiercest clashes of Europe and Africa in modern days. The Zulus fought desperately, annihilating at one time a whole detachment and killing the young prince Napoleon. But after all it was a.s.sagais against machine guns, and the Zulus were finally defeated at Ulundi, July 4, 1879. Thereupon Zululand was divided among thirteen semi-independent chiefs and became a British protectorate.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Ancient Kingdom of Africa]

Since then the best lands have been gradually reoccupied by a large number of tribes--Kaffirs from the south and Zulus from the north. The tribal organization, without being actually broken up, has been deprived of its dangerous features by appointing paid village headmen and transforming the hereditary chief into a British government official. In Natal there are about one hundred and seventy tribal chiefs, and nearly half of these have been appointed by the governor.

Umsilikatsi, who had been driven into Matabililand by the terrible Chaka in 1828 and defeated by the Dutch in 1837, had finally reestablished his headquarters in Rhodesia in 1838. Here he introduced the Zulu military system and terrorized the peaceful and industrious Bechuana populations.

Lobengula succeeded Umsilikatsi in 1870 and, realizing that his power was waning, began to retreat northward toward the Zambesi. He was finally defeated by the British and native forces in 1893 and the land was incorporated into South Central Africa.

The result of all these movements was to break the inhabitants of Bechua.n.a.land into numerous fragments. There were small numbers of mulatto Gricquas in the southwest and similar Bastaards in the northwest. The Hottentots and Bushmen were dispersed into groups and seem doomed to extinction, the last Hottentot chief being deposed in 1810 and replaced by an English magistrate. Partially civilized Hottentots still live grouped together in their kraals and are members of Christian churches. The Bechuana hold their own in several centers; one is in Basutoland, west of Natal, where a number of tribes were welded together under the far-sighted Moshesh into a modern and fairly well civilized nation. In the north part of Bechua.n.a.land are the self-governing Bamangwato and the Batwana, the former ruled by Khama, one of the canniest of modern rulers in Africa.

Meantime, in Portuguese territory south of the Zambesi, there arose Gaza, a contemporary and rival of Chaka. His son, Manikus, was deputed by Dingan, Chaka's successor, to drive out the Portuguese. This Manikus failed to do, and to escape vengeance he migrated north of the Limpopo.

Here he established his military kraal in a district thirty-six hundred and fifty feet above the sea and one hundred and twenty miles inland from Sofala. From this place his soldiery nearly succeeded in driving the Portuguese out of East Africa. He was succeeded by his son, Umzila, and Umzila's brother, Guzana (better known as Gungunyana), who exercised for a time joint authority. Gungunyana was finally overthrown in November, 1895, captured, and removed to the Azores.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Races in Africa]

North of the Zambesi, in British territory, the chief role in recent times has been played by the Bechuana, the first of the Bantu to return northward after the South African migration. Livingstone found there the Makolo, who with other tribes had moved northward on account of the pressure of the Dutch and Zulus below, and by conquering various tribes in the Zambesi region had established a strong power. This kingdom was nearly overthrown by the rebellion of the Barotse, and in 1875 the Barotse kingdom comprised a large territory. To-day their king, Lewanika, rules directly and indirectly fifty thousand square miles, with a population between one and two and a half million. They are under a protectorate of the British.

In Southwest Africa, Hottentot mulattoes crossing from the Cape caused widespread change. They were strong men and daring fighters and soon became dominant in what is now German Southwest Africa, where they fought fiercely with the Bantu Ova-Hereros. Armed with fire arms, these Namakwa Hottentots threatened Portuguese West Africa, but Germany intervened, ostensibly to protect missionaries. By spending millions of dollars and thousands of soldiers Germany has nearly exterminated these brave men.

Thus we have between the years 1400 and 1900 a great period of migration up to 1750, when Bushmen, Hottentot, Bantu, and Dutch appeared in succession at Land's End. In the latter part of the eighteenth century we have the clash of the Hottentots and Bechuana, followed in the nineteenth century by the terrible wars of Chaka, the Kaffirs, and Matabili. Finally, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, we see the gradual subjection of the Kaffir-Zulus and the Bechuana under the English and the final conquest of the Dutch. The resulting racial problem in South Africa is one of great intricacy.

To the racial problem has been added the tremendous problem of modern capital brought by the discovery of gold and diamond mines, so that the future of the Negro race is peculiarly bound up in developments here at Land's End, where the s.h.i.+p of the Flying Dutchman beats back and forth on its endless quest.

FOOTNOTES:

[34] Stowe: Native Races of South Africa, pp. 215-216.

VIII AFRICAN CULTURE

We have followed the history of mankind in Africa down the valley of the Nile, past Ethiopia to Egypt; we have seen kingdoms arise along the great bend of the Niger and strive with the ancient culture at its mouth. We have seen the remnants of mankind at Land's End, the ancient culture at Punt and Zymbabwe, and followed the invading Bantu east, south, and west to their greatest center in the vast jungle of the Congo valleys.

We must now gather these threads together and ask what manner of men these were and how far and in what way they progressed on the road of human culture.

That Negro peoples were the beginners of civilization along the Ganges, the Euphrates, and the Nile seems proven. Early Babylon was founded by a Negroid race. Hammurabi's code, the most ancient known, says ”Anna and Bel called me, Hammurabi the exalted prince, the wors.h.i.+per of the G.o.ds; to cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked, to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak, to go forth like the sun over the black-head race, to enlighten the land, and to further the welfare of the people.” The a.s.syrians show a distinct Negroid strain and early Egypt was predominantly Negro. These earliest of cultures were crude and primitive, but they represented the highest attainment of mankind after tens of thousands of years in unawakened savagery.

It has often been a.s.sumed that the Negro is physically inferior to other races and markedly distinguishable from them; modern science gives no authority for such an a.s.sumption. The supposed inferiority cannot rest on color,[35] for that is ”due to the combined influences of a great number of factors of environment working through physiological processes,” and ”however marked the contrasts may be, there is no corresponding difference in anatomical structure discoverable.”[36] So, too, difference in texture of hair is a matter of degree, not kind, and is caused by heat, moisture, exposure, and the like.

The bony skeleton presents no distinctly racial lines of variation.

Prognathism ”presents too many individual varieties to be taken as a distinctive character of race.”[37] Difference in physical measurements does not show the Negro to be a more primitive evolutionary form.

Comparative ethnology to-day affords ”no support to the view which sees in the so-called lower races of mankind a transition stage from beast to man.”[38]

Much has been made of the supposed smaller brain of the Negro race; but this is as yet an unproved a.s.sumption, based on the uncritical measurement of less than a thousand Negro brains as compared with eleven thousand or more European brains. Even if future measurement prove the average Negro brain lighter, the vast majority of Negro brain weights fall within the same limits as the whites; and finally, ”neither size nor weight of the brain seems to be of importance” as an index of mental capacity. We may, therefore, say with Ratzel, ”There is only one species of man. The variations are numerous, but do not go deep.”[39]

To this we may add the word of the Secretary of the First Races Congress: ”We are, then, under the necessity of concluding that an impartial investigator would be inclined to look upon the various important peoples of the world as to all intents and purposes essentially equal in intellect, enterprise, morality, and physique.”[40]

If these conclusions are true, we should expect to see in Africa the human drama play itself out much as in other lands, and such has actually been the fact. At the same time we must expect peculiarities arising from the physiography of the land--its climate, its rainfall, its deserts, and the peculiar inaccessibility of the coast.

Three princ.i.p.al zones of habitation appear: first, the steppes and deserts around the Sahara in the north and the Kalahari desert in the south; secondly, the gra.s.sy highlands bordering the Great Lakes and connecting these two regions; thirdly, the forests and rivers of Central and West Africa. In the deserts are the nomads, and the Pygmies are in the forest fastnesses. Herdsmen and their cattle cover the steppes and highlands, save where the tsetse fly prevents. In the open forests and gra.s.sy highlands are the agriculturists.

Among the forest farmers the village is the center of life, while in the open steppes political life tends to spread into larger political units.